The Value of the Moon

by Paul D. Spudis

  The United States very publicly won the race to the Moon, giving rise to a flurry of pronouncements about everyone’s peaceful intentions for outer space, while the larger struggle continued to play out behind the scenes. NASA’s replacement effort for the concluded Apollo program, the space shuttle project, promised to lower the costs of space travel by providing a reusable vehicle that would launch like a rocket and land like an airplane. Because of the need to fit under a tightly constrained budgetary envelope, and for a variety of other technical reasons, the shuttle did not live up to its promise as a low-cost “truck” for space flight. However, the program resulted in a fleet of five operational spacecraft that successfully flew 133 missions over the course of its 30-year history.

  Although some in American space circles have called it a policy failure, the shuttle had some interesting characteristics that caused it to be considered a military threat by the USSR. An early shuttle mission had its crew retrieve an orbiting satellite, Solar Max, for repair. Later missions grappled balky satellites and returned them to Earth for refurbishment, repair, and re-launch. This capability culminated with a series of shuttle missions to the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) that conducted on-orbit servicing tasks, ranging from correcting the flawed optics of the original telescope (the first service mission) to the routine upgrading of sensors, the replacement of solar arrays and main computers, and the reboosting of the telescope to a higher orbit. The significance of these missions was that the HST is basically a strategic reconnaissance satellite: It looks up at the heavens rather than down at nuclear missile sites from orbit. The Hubble repair missions documented the value of accessing orbital assets with people and servicing equipment.

  Another relatively unnoticed series of shuttle missions demonstrated the value of advanced sensors. As a large, stable platform in orbit (its orbiting mass was almost 100 metric tons), the shuttle was able to fly very heavy, high-power payloads that smaller robotic satellites could not. The Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR) was a synthetic-aperture instrument that could obtain images of Earth from space by sending out radar pulses as an illuminating beam. It was able to image through cloud cover, day or night, all over the Earth. In a stunning realization, we found that it could also image subsurface features from space—in particular, the SIR-A mission mapped ancient riverbeds buried beneath the sands of the eastern Sahara.6 The strategic implications of this discovery were immense; as most land-based nuclear missiles are buried in silos, the use of sensors like imaging radar means that they cannot remain hidden.

  These new capabilities, provided by the space shuttle, had significant policy implications for the Soviets. To them, it seemed that the shuttle was a great leap forward in military space technology, not the “policy failure” bemoaned by American analysts. With its capabilities for on-orbit satellite servicing and as a platform for advanced sensors, the shuttle became a threat that had to be countered. The USSR responded with Buran, its version of a space shuttle, which looked superficially similar to the American version. The Challenger accident showed that the shuttle was a highly vulnerable system in many respects; even as the Soviets developed Buran, the American military had already decided to withdraw from the shuttle program.

  During the 1990s, we saw a revolution in tactical space—the use of, and reliance on, space assets on the modern battlefield. The global positioning system (GPS) has made the transition to the consumer market, but it was originally designed for our troops to instantly know their exact locations. A global network of communications satellites carries both voice and data, and interfaces to the partly space-based Internet, another innovation originally built for military technical research. Now, the entire world is connected and plugged in, and spacebridges are important components of that connection. Fifty years into the Space Age, we are all vitally dependent, both economically and militarily, on our satellite-based assets; space is, by default, in control of Earth’s economic sphere. Whoever controls cislunar space controls what happens on Earth.

  Most people do not know about the multitude of satellites in various orbits around the Earth that affect their daily lives. We rely on satellites to provide us with instantaneous global communications that affect almost everything we do. We use GPS to find out both where we are and where we are going. Weather stations in orbit monitor the globe, alerting us to coming storms so that their destructive effects can be minimized. Remote space sensors map the land and sea, permitting us to understand the distribution of various properties and how they change with time. Other satellites look outward to the Sun, which controls the Earth’s climate, and “space weather,” which influences radio propagation. The satellites orbiting the Earth provide us with phenomenal amounts of information. Fortunately, they are not yet self-aware—but the people who operate them are.

  All satellites are vulnerable. Components constantly break down and must be replaced. New technology makes existing facilities obsolete, requiring high-cost replacements. A satellite must fit within and on top of the largest launch vehicle we have. Spacecraft thus have practical size limits, which in turn limits their capabilities and lifetimes. Once a satellite stops working, it is abandoned and a replacement must be designed, launched, and put into its proper orbit, all at great cost.

  Although satellite aging is normal and expected, catastrophic loss, either accidental or deliberate, is always a concern. Encounters between objects in space tend to be at very high velocities. The ever-increasing amounts of debris and junk in orbit, such as pieces of old rockets and satellites, can hit functioning satellites and destroy them.7 North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) carefully tracks the bigger pieces of space junk. Some spacecraft, such as the International Space Station, can be maneuvered out of the path of big chunks of oncoming debris, but smaller pieces, say, the size of a bolt or screw, cannot be tracked and avoided. Such debris could cripple a satellite if it collides with some critical part of the vehicle.

  Antisatellite warfare (ASAT) is another possible cause of failure. It has long been recognized that satellites are extremely vulnerable to attack, and both the US and the USSR experimented with ASAT warfare during the Cold War. ASAT takes advantage of the fragility of these spacecraft to render them inoperative. This can be done with remote effectors, such as lasers to “blind” optical sensors. The simplest ASAT weapon is a kinetic impactor. By intercepting a satellite with a projectile at a high relative velocity, the satellite is rapidly and easily disintegrated and rendered worthless.

  Despite their vulnerability, the destruction of space assets has seldom happened by accident and never as an overt act of war. They are left alone because they are not easy to get to. Some orbiting spacecraft occupy low Earth orbit (LEO) and are accessible to interceptors, but many valuable strategic assets reside in the much higher orbits of middle Earth orbit (MEO) between 3,000 and 35,000 kilometers, and in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) at 35,786 kilometers. Such orbits are difficult to reach, requiring long transit times and complex orbital maneuvers, which quickly reveal themselves and their purpose to ground-based tracking.

  After a booster failure in 1998, a communications satellite was left in a useless transfer orbit. Engineers at Hughes, the makers of the satellite, devised a clever scheme to send the satellite to GEO using a gravity assist from the Moon. This first “commercial” use of a flight to the Moon saved the expensive satellite for its planned use.8 One aspect of this rescue is seldom mentioned but it attracted the attention of military space watchers everywhere. This mission dramatically illustrated the importance of what is called “situational awareness” in space. Most trips to GEO travel from LEO upward; this satellite came down from the Moon, approaching GEO from an unobserved (and at least partly unobservable) direction, one not ordinarily monitored by ground-based tracking systems.

  With few exceptions, we are not able to access satellites to repair or upgrade them. Satellites must be self-contained. Once they stop working, they are replaced. Sometimes favorable conditions allow us to be clever and re
scue an asset that had been written off, but the system is not designed for such operation. The current spaceflight paradigm is a use and throwaway culture. Our history with the space shuttle program demonstrates that this template need not be the way of conducting business in the future. What is missing is the ability to get people and servicing machines out to the various satellites in all their myriad locations. Reaching LEO is easy, but MEO and GEO cannot be accessed with existing space systems. Yet from the experience of the shuttle and the ISS, we know that if these satellites could be visited, a revolution in the way spaceflight is approached might be possible.

  A system with the ability to routinely go to and from the lunar surface is also able to access any other point in cislunar space (see figure 6.1). Our next goal in space should be to create the capability to inhabit the Moon and live off its local resources with the goals of self-sufficiency and sustainability, including learning the skills of propellant production and the refueling of cislunar transport vehicles. Eventually, we can export lunar propellant to fueling depots throughout cislunar space. In short, by going to the Moon, we create a new and qualitatively different capability for space access, a “transcontinental railroad” in space. Such a system would completely transform the paradigm of spaceflight. We can develop serviceable satellites, unlike current ones designed to be abandoned once they fail. This new capability will allow us to create extensible, upgradeable systems. The ability to transport people and machines throughout cislunar space permits the construction of distributed instead of self-contained systems. Such space assets are more flexible, more capable, and more readily defended than conventional ones.

  With knowledge of these possibilities, questions arise as to how close we are to developing such a system and if such a paradigm shift for spaceflight is desirable. Are we still in a space race, or is that an obsolete concept? Answers to these questions are not at all obvious. We must understand and consider them fully, as this information is known or available to all spacefaring nations to adopt and adapt for their own use.

  The previous space race to land a man on the Moon was a demonstration to the USSR and to the world of our technological superiority. The July 1969 landing of Apollo 11, by any reckoning, gave us technical credibility for the Cold War endgame. It was a huge win for United States and a serious blow to communism. Fifteen years after the moon landing, President Reagan advocated the development of a missile defense shield, the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Although many in the West disparaged this as technically unattainable, the Soviets took the program very seriously. Because the United States had already succeeded in completing a very difficult technical task, the manned lunar landing, something that the Soviet Union could not accomplish, they did not question our technical skill or our resolve. The Soviets knew that a deployment of a US missile shield would instantly render their entire nuclear strategic capability useless.

  Not only did the Apollo program achieve its literal objective of landing a man on the Moon (propaganda, soft power), but it also achieved its more abstract objective of intimidating our Soviet adversary (technical surprise, hard power).9 Apollo thus played a significant role in ending the Cold War, one far in excess of what many scholars believe. Similarly, our two follow-on programs of shuttle/station, although fraught with technical issues and deficiencies as tools of exploration, were significant in our understanding and pursuit of human spaceflight, providing us with a way to get people and machines to satellite assets for construction, servicing, extension, and repair. We learned how to assemble very large systems in space from smaller pieces. From our experience constructing the ISS, mastery of these skills suggests that the construction of new, large distributed systems for communications, surveillance, and other tasks is possible. These new space systems would be much more capable and enabling than existing ones.

  Warfare in space is not as it is depicted in science-fiction movies, with flying saucers blasting lasers at speeding spaceships. The real threat from space warfare is the denial of assets: Communications satellites are silenced, reconnaissance satellites are blinded, and GPS constellations are made inoperative.10 Possessing this capability completely disrupts command and control and compels reliance on terrestrially based systems, making force projection and coordination more difficult, cumbersome, and slower.

  By testing ASAT weapons in space, China has indicated that it fully understands the military benefits of hard space power.11 It also has a well-developed lunar program. Currently, China’s ambition of flags and footprints on the Moon represents soft power projection. Since only the United States has done this in the past, China would celebrate a successful manned lunar mission as a great propaganda coup. Sending taikonauts, as the Chinese call their astronauts, beyond low Earth orbit is a statement of technical parity with the United States. Historically known for taking the long view, often spanning decades, unlike the short-term view that America favors, China understands and appreciates the strategic importance and value of cislunar space.12 Thus, although initial Chinese plans for human lunar missions do not feature resource utilization (ISRU), they know from the technical literature that this activity is both possible and enabling.

  The Chinese are also aware of the value of the Moon as a “backdoor” to approach other levels of cislunar space, as demonstrated by the rescue of the Hughes communications satellite. The lunar mission Chang’E 2 is an instructive case in point. Ostensibly a global mapper, the Chang’E 2 spacecraft was launched to the Moon in October 2010. It successfully inserted into lunar orbit and spent the next eight months mapping the surface in detail. Then, the mission took a strange turn; after leaving lunar orbit in June 2011, the Chang’E 2 spacecraft slowly traveled to the Sun-Earth L-2 point (fixed in space relative to the Earth) where it proceeded to loiter for the next eight months. Departing the L-2 point in April 2012, the Chang’E 2 spacecraft then intercepted and flew past and within about three kilometers of Toutatis, a near-Earth asteroid orbiting the Sun. The spacecraft successfully sent images and other data of its encounter back to Earth.

  This mission profile is significant in terms of space defense. The Chinese demonstrated their ability to dispatch and maneuver a craft throughout cislunar space, including the tasks of rendezvous and interception, and to command and operate this vehicle throughout the multiyear duration of the mission. Loiter, interception, and action on command are three pillars of antisatellite warfare. Moreover, a spacecraft on an interception path from above—rather than below, as would be the case for antisatellite missions launched from Earth—is much more difficult to detect and track. In short, with the Chang’E 2 mission, China demonstrated that it possesses the ability to base ASAT weapons in deep cislunar space and intercept trans-LEO space assets at will, assets that have very little in the way of defensive capabilities.

  If space resource extraction and commerce is possible, a significant question emerges: What societal paradigm shall prevail in this new economy? Many New Space advocates assume that free markets and capitalism are the obvious organizing principles of space commerce, but others may not agree. For example, to China, a government-corporatist oligarchy, the benefits of a pluralistic free-market system are not obvious. Western capitalism is successful because of the enforcement of and respect for contract law. Implementation of capitalism in the developing world has met with mixed results, and truly free markets do not exist in China. What will the organizing principle of society in the new commerce of space resources be: the rule of law or authoritarian oligarchy? An American win in this new race for space does not guarantee that free markets will prevail, but an American loss could ensure that free markets would not emerge and drive expansion on this new frontier. The struggle for soft power projection in space is ongoing.

  Once it was decided upon in 1961, President John F. Kennedy laid out the reasons why America had to go the Moon.13 Among the many ideas he articulated, one stands out: “Whatever men shall undertake, free men must fully share.” This is a classic expression of A
merican exceptionalism, the idea that we explore new frontiers not to establish an empire, but to ensure that our political and economic system prevails, a system that has created the most freedom and placed the most new wealth in the hands of the greatest number of people in the history of the world. This is a statement of both soft and hard power projection; by leading the world into space, we guarantee that space does not become the private domain of powers who view humanity as cogs in their ideological machine, but rather as individuals to be valued and protected, and given the opportunity and latitude to innovate and prosper.

  The Moon is the first destination beyond LEO because it has the material and energy resources needed to create a true spacefaring system. Recent data from the Moon show that it is even richer in resource potential than we had previously thought; both abundant water and near-permanent sunlight are available at selected areas near the poles. We go to the Moon to learn how to extract and use those resources to create a space transportation system that can routinely access all of cislunar space, with both machines and people. Such a system is the logical next step in both space security and space commerce. This goal for NASA makes the agency relevant to important national interests. A return to the Moon for resource utilization contributes to national security and economic interests, as well as scientific ones.

  We are in a new space race, and it is a struggle that has both hard and soft power dimensions. This race is real and more vital to our country’s future than the original one, if not as widely recognized and appreciated. The hard power aspect is to confront the ability of other nations to deny us access to our vital satellite assets in cislunar space. The soft power aspect is a question: How shall society be organized in space? Both concerns are equally important and both can be addressed by lunar return. Will space remain an ever-shrinking sanctuary for science and public relations stunts, or will it be a true frontier, opened wide to scientists and pilots, as well as miners, technicians, entrepreneurs, and settlers? Decisions made now will decide the fate of spacefaring and affect our national economic and security status for generations.